WARNING! The following blog is highly musical. Read and click play buttons at your own risk.
When talking about someone as classic as Emily Dickinson, people usually expect you to make grand literary comparisons and DEEP connections to other writers. Instead, I offer you Lady Gaga. Enjoy!
Most people, when looking for a relationship, tend to want to find a good one, not a bad one. And yet, as we talked about in class, there are advantages to relationships that sit outside the scope of normal relationships. And if you listen to the lyrics, Lady Gaga’s persona in the song isn’t begging to be free of her man, she’s begging to keep him: You know that I want you/and you know that I need you/I want it bad/A bad romance. With lyrics like “I want your love and/ I want your revenge” or “I want your horror/I want your design” who could say she doesn’t like or even love her relationship? Sure, it’s not something I would want. I mean, I’m pretty sure I don’t want someone’s horror or revenge, especially romantically. But I can see how this might appeal to some people.
Like we talked about in class there’s a certain power relationships like this one or S&M relationships. There is a certain power in allowing someone to have power over you. I was the one who made the joke about a pick-up line in such a world being “I’ve got a tomahawk, do you have a side I can put it in” but that doesn’t mean I think the entire idea can be laughed off. In a language of love where the vocabulary is all words of pain, I can certainly see advantages. In an S&M relationship, there would have to be a level of unbreakable trust between partners that the submissive partner has the rights to say when, how, how much, and when to stop in their antics. Do I still think that’s a little odd? Yes, I do. Then again, I’m not a masochist and have no desire to feel pain. But if the language of love was pain and all I’d ever known? Personally, I think if I’d grown up in a society that prioritized pain in love, I’m sure I wouldn’t be so afraid of getting hurt in my current romantic relationship (even if those fears are unfounded.) Can you image being in a world where no one has to be afraid to ask someone out because love is supposed to be pain? Would there be fear in rejection if pain was the only way you knew how to express love? I feel that this is the same principle as ‘The Anglerfish Song’ by Vlogbrother Hank Green. The lyrics address this theory directly: If I feel it all the time can you really call it pain?
Dickinson shows us glimpses of a world like this in her poetry. At the end of one of her poems we were told in class was addressed to Sue said “So we must keep apart/you there, I here/with just the door ajar/that oceans are/and prayer/and that pale sustenance/Despair” (Dickinson 169). That right there speaks of literally OCEANS of pain! I feel as though a lot of her unrequited love went out to Sue, especially after she married her brother and when Emily finally made the choice not to visit their home anymore. In a way she “stopped being theirs” and by refusing to see her own brother she let go of everything that people had “dropped upon” her and instead chose to make her way differently (Dickinson 170). You can see her deep attachment to Sue in several of her ‘love’ poems, the way she was haunted as she wrote after their “parting” that she longed for Sue her “heaven of heavens” and the “privilege/Of one another’s eyes” (Dickinson 170). One of the most touching poems to me was the one where Emily spoke as going to sleep with “a jewel” in her hand, but that when she awoke “the gem was gone/And now an amethyst remembrance/Is all I own” (Dickinson 184). Unrequited love or seemingly lost love like in this case is, in my opinion, the most painful kind. The worst part is that it’s relatable for everyone. Whether it was a lover, a pet, a crush, a family member, a spouse, or just a friend, everyone at some point in their life has felt the loss that loving someone can inspire when they’re taken away from you in some fashion. One of the reasons I feel Emily Dickinson’s writing is so accessible to so many people is because we all understand the language of pain, even if we don’t experience it the same way. Pain, like love, is universal.
One of the other worlds of love we talked about on Monday’s class was a world of love in which love is shown by submission, compliance, docility, and other such means of expression. On the one hand, I see validity in Beth’s point that with such a vocabulary, people would be more trusting and open in relationships because by using such a vocabulary they’re constantly showing their vulnerable side. But, personally, I feel like that kind of world would be horrific. The thought of a world where everyone in love would be bending over backwards trying to please their partner makes me want to throw things. One of the things someone said in class about this world would be that couples would be more likes slaves to one another than lovers, and I think that’s true. I know there are times when my boyfriend and I are a bit indecisive when it comes to things like picking out a movie to watch and going back and forth saying the other can decide, but one of us (usually me) gets fed up and just picks what they want. In a world where subservience and subjugation is the key to a loving relationship, I feel like people would never make a decision. They’d be just like the vultures in ‘The Jungle Book’:
In juxtaposition with these worlds Dickinson offers us, I much prefer the ideas set down in ‘Wild Nights’ and ‘I’m Nobody’. I’d much rather throw off the shackles and labels society has given me to chart my own path or paths purely on my own authority. Emily Dickinson had the right idea when she said “how dreary” it would be to “be somebody” (Dickinson 18). In life, you’re going to get labeled, but that doesn’t mean you have to live by your labels, just like you don’t have to follow the path set for you in life by your parents or anyone else. There are days I’d love to be “done with compass/done with chart” and just get on a bus headed west for no reason other than to BE somewhere else than here (Dickinson 179). That might be the sheer flighty and restless parts of my nature poking through, but there are times I crave to take “my power in my hand” and just leave (Dickinson 36). Inner power is something we all seem, as a society, to take for granted. If society is on the interstate of life, I want to be skipping off alone down some dirt path over to the side towards lush, green, more mysterious ends.
Can you feel the oncoming musical connection? Emily Dickinson, depending on her taste in music if she knew anything about our generation, would I think appreciate Green Day if only for their parallel lyrics to the themes in some of her poems. For the sake of this discussion, I’m using ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’.
Remember my dirt road I wanted to travel down? I would gladly be Billy’s shadow and go with him. Just look at the sheer poetry of his lyrics, and how they relate to Emily Dickinson’s idea of getting rid of the maps, directs, and what society wants us to do to just be what you want to be! For example, I feel the first verse ties directly to “Wild Nights”: I walk a lonely road/The only one that I have ever known/Don’t know where it goes/But its only me and I walk alone/ I walk this empty street/On the boulevard of broken dreams/Where the city sleeps/And I’m the only one and I walk alone.” I love the connections both the poet and the singer make to not needing to know where you’re going, how you’re getting there, or even why you’re going in order to live your life. The title line in the song especially to me seems to point out WHY we need to throw away everything we’re supposed to do in favor of doing what we want to do – so that OUR dreams don’t end up broken somewhere, unfulfilled and treated like garbage.
Unfulfilled dreams, to me, are second only to nightmares. After reading Transformations by Anne Sexton, I’m a little surprised I didn’t have any of my own! Ironically, the poems that turned my stomach more than the others (Rapunzel and Briar Rose) were the poems I loved the most. As we talked about in class, the horror in our favorite fairytales is often overlooked. One of the best examples, and most realistic to real life applications, is Rumplestiltskin. Both the original version and Anne Sexton’s show us both the horrors of being forced to perform tasks we can’t accomplish and the mother’s fear of having her child stolen from her in some way. Both are “a monster of despair” on their own ways, one from knowing a situation is hopeless and needing a miracle to get out of it alive, the other from separation anxiety between a mother and the child she fears will be taken from her (Sexton 17).
With the background we were given on Sexton in class on how she reportedly used to abuse her children, I can’t help but feel that she is akin to the girl in the poem. In the poem she made the deal with the dwarf to give him her firstborn child with only a small “piffle” and no scruples about whether or not she would regret it (Sexton 20). In real life, I can imagine Sexton making the decision to have kids without really thinking about whether or not she really wanted them or even wanted to be a mother. As she raised them, Sexton proved by her treatment of her children that she couldn’t handle being a mother. In the poem, this is where the character and the author take separate paths. Whereas Sexton supposedly abused her children, which is enough for me to deem her an unfit mother if it’s true, the character in the poem strives to earn the right to call herself a good mother. Instead of handing her child over “she offered him all the kingdom” and “cried two pails of sea water” trying to get him to reconsider taking her baby (Sexton 20). I still feel she should have thought harder about making the deal in the first place. Readers knew he would come to collect, so why didn’t she?
When it comes to debunked fairytales, I feel like it’s easy to become disillusioned or disenchanted to the whole idea of magic, fairy godmothers, and happy endings. Without something to look forwards to in the world, like fairytale magic, why move forwards? What do we have to live for? In stories, the leads always cling to their ‘soul mates’ to weather every storm. In real life, we cling to friends, family, and lovers for strength. In that way, we become each other’s only hope for survival. Did that sound like a song cue to you? Here’s a clue: It totally was.
In fairytales, people come through unscathed for the most part. Like Beth, one of the things I likes best in Briar Rose was that she was scared by her experiences, that “she could not nap/or lie in sleep” without “knock-out drops” to make her sleep dreamless, or like in Hansel and Gretel they speak of “only at suppertime/while eating a chicken leg/did our children remember/the woe of the oven” (Sexton 111, 105). In the same way, the character in the song is shaken by his remembrances: I still remember there/Covered in ash/Covered in glass/Covered in all my friends/I still think of the bombs they built. Like Rapunzel and her prince, the maiden with no hands and her king, and Briar Rose with her prince, the character in the song relies on another person to get him “out of prison” when he says {can I be the only hope for you/because you’re the only hope for me/if we can find where be belong/we’ll have to make it on our own/face all the pain and take it on/because the only hope for me is you alone} (Sexton 110). In this way, instead of relying on fairy godmothers or magic to save them, people rely on one another to find meaning in their lives after trauma sets in. And, honestly, who wouldn’t need someone after all the things these fairytale broads have gone through?
One of things I loved most about them was the fact that they were more human than usual fairytales are. The horror of the human element in the poems was still there where we could see them. This came through especially well to me in Briar Rose most explicitly the virginal vulnerability the world LOVES to take advantage of and the King’s terrifying relationship with his daughter. Like The Shining and the works we read by Edgar Allen Poe, this is a poem that shows the family setting as the seat of true horror. I feel as though with this story we can take the magic out of the story and go back to the theory from class that Rumplestiltskin was just another part of the damsel’s inner self and not an actual dwarf aiding her. In the book Identical by Ellen Hopkins, the story is told from the point of views of twin sisters Kaeleigh and Raeanne who switch voices every chapter [if you plan on reading the book, the next sentence is a MASSIVE SPOILER so don’t read it!]. Towards the end, you find out that to cope with the sexual abuse her father is conducting on her, Kaeleigh splits her personality in half and at times assumes the identity of her dead twin Raeanne.
In the same way, it could be interpreted that in a real-world sense looking at Anne Sexton’s history, Briar Rose’s hundred year slumber was actually her coping mechanism, a thing she made up in her head to distance herself from the horrors that occurred to her at the hands of her father. At the beginning we’re told she’s in “a hypnotist’s trance,” perhaps where she can pretend everything’s alright, the reference to her being “stuck in the time machine” meaning she tries to only think or live in the moments before the abuse or the years of her youth before everything started happening (Sexton 107). The fairy who puts a curse on her could be interpreted as either being Sexton’s aunt, who it was also speculated to have had sexually abused her, or her own mother who sat by while her father abused her without aiding her. Briar Rose, like Anne Sexton, is said “grew to be a goddess” (Sexton 109). The last three stanzas of the poem are also told from the first person point of view, perhaps suggesting the end of the poem is spoken specifically from Sexton’s point of view to the reader. Sexton, who wanted death for herself in her numerous suicide attempts, would lay “in her grave” if you put her there and “never call back: Hello there” but the sheer sexual quality of the poet as described by the actress’s quote in class suggests “if you kissed her on the mouth/her eyes would spring open” (Sexton 111).
All fairytales can be debunked in a way, the horrors within revealed. In this vein, I offer you my final installment to this musical blog: ‘Brick by Boring Brick’ by Paramore.
The opening lines set up the story we’ve all heard {She lives in a fairytale/Somewhere too far for us to find} but then get the first glimpse that everything isn’t all sunshine and roses, that the smell “rank as honeysuckle” had crept in here too (Sexton 108). Like Briar Rose who has forgotten what restful sleep is like, the girl in the song has {forgotten the taste and smell/of the world that she’s left behind}. {The angles are all wrong now} in all of Anne Sexton’s fairytales, the dark underbelly poking through, shoving aside the lovely fantasy we shroud ourselves in to forget the horrors and black spots in the tales. Just as we can’t image a fairytale princess {ripping wings off of butterflies} we probably couldn’t imagine a father before now in a fairytale “drunkenly bent” over his daughter’s bed upon her “like some sleeping jellyfish” (Sexton 112). After reading Transformations I want to {bury the castle} in every story, to cause “the big blackout” that will take all the horror out of childhood stories forever and we can inject happiness and hope “with my dolls/My childhood” memories instead (Sexton 34; Dickinson 170). One of the things I always hate about fairytales is the idea that just because {her prince finally came to save her} the princess automatically loves and marries him, like in Rapunzel the prince and Rapunzel find each other and “they lived happily ever after as you might expect” (Sexton 42). Like in Puss in Boots where Puss lies to get his friend into the King’s carriage, {it was a trick but the clock truck twelve} like the peasant in The Little Peasant who the Miller’s wife never saw as being a threat being the parson’s downfall, characters in fairytales need to learn to tie up loose ends and {build your house brick by boring brick/or the wolf’s gonna blow it down}. Like Briar Rose with her slumber, Anne Sexton {built up a world of magic/because your real life is tragic} to get the memories of being “passed hand to hand” out of her mind (Sexton 112).
But is there a glimmer of hope? For me, it came in The Maiden with No Hands. The ending of the poem, once the King has fasted like “Mahatma Gandhi” “seven years in the woods” waiting for them to return, they did (Sexton 84). To me, this shows love, like Emily Dickinson’s pain as a language of love poems do. You have to really love someone to go to the woods alone for several years and not eat a thing. Together, as a family, “they returned to the castle” (Sexton 85). Even though there is a darker undertone to the poem, in that the King kept her as “a talisman” or as his “luck” I still hold onto the fact that at the end of the poem he keeps his wife and child, even though they aren’t damage shields for him as they’re whole beings now (Sexton 85). For once, love appears to have conquered its opposition.
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